A stoic generation

ByRobert Harbison / staff photographerMay 13, 2002

Sally Young lives a half mile from the 2,250-megawatt Navajo Generating Station in the background. The plant came on line in 1974 and sends power to communities as far away as Las Vegas and Phoenix. Though her home is wired for electricity, Mrs. Young had no power at the time this photo was taken in January 1999. The grandmother, who speaks only Navajo, lives in this two-room house near Page, Ariz. She said through her daughter that when she let the power company have access to her land, her house was supposed to be hooked up to the power grid. She was more bemused than angry. She was much more concerned about the environmental effects of the plant, particularly that of strip-mining the coal to run it. Tribe members have had to move off strip-mined land, and enormous amounts of water are used to move the coal in a slurry pipeline to other faraway generating plants.